Empowered users know their information needs

In his seminal work In Search of Excellence, business guru and Teradata Universe keynote speaker Tom Peters identifies common denominators of America’s most successful businesses. Among others, Peter highlights customer-centred approaches and several characteristics (bias for action, autonomy and entrepreneurship) that we might refer to as “agility”. Simultaneously, Peters emphasizes the importance of sparking enthusiasm among your employees.

Peters’ call to empower employees on all levels of organization is widely considered as the blue-print for operational business intelligence as we know it. And it’s being taken another step further with the advent of “private clouds” in enterprise data warehouse environments. As business users have become increasingly adept in using BI tools, they want more and more of them. And they want them fast, to help them explore the relevant data while their freshly-conceived questions are still in their minds. Private clouds are not so much a technology trend as a response to growing demands from the business side.

This is good news because it means that those empowered and motivated employees that Peters had envisaged don’t seem to fall into the trap of making decisions based on “experience”, which would come down to pure intuition. As Stephen Brobst said in Istanbul last year, “don’t trust your guts. Your guts will deceive you.” Instead, business users at multiple organizational levels realize (and describe) their information needs. And private clouds make it easier than ever before to fulfil these needs.